IMPROVING HEALTHCARE DATA
MANAGEMENT
Beyond Silos: Meeting the Data Management
Challenge
TABLE OF CONTENTS
A DELUGE OF DATA .......................................... 2
TRENDS DRIVING A NEED FOR CHANGE ........... 2
Infrastructure Management Complications Due to
Data Growth ....................................................... 3
SEEKING A SOLUTION ...................................... 3
EMC Isilon simplicity, scalability, and best-in-class
performance........................................................ 3
Moving Beyond Silos to Better Healthcare Data
Management ....................................................... 4
EMC PERSPECTIVE
THE DIFFICULTIES
WITH SILOED
MEDICAL STORAGE
Most healthcare organizations
dedicate specific storage systems to
each of their diagnostic disciplines.
This can create difficulties:
• Dedicated storage creates multiple
storage silos, which can inhibit
data sharing across departments
and increase storage management
complexity.
• Storage silos reduce utilization
rates and increase the inefficiency
and cost of data management.
• Storage silos inhibit the
collaboration between
departments, making data
correlation across disciplines
difficult and increasing the
complexity of performing analytics.
A DELUGE OF DATA
A big part of routine daily healthcare management operations is managing huge
volumes of data—and it’s becoming increasingly more of a challenge. EMC estimates
the amount of stored healthcare data nearly doubles every two years. The amount of
data managed will continue to grow as healthcare organizations add new equipment
and incorporate data-intensive, next-generation diagnostic tools.
Healthcare data is typically housed on “siloed” systems based on department usage or
specific functions. This siloing creates complexity; each storage system must be
managed separately, reducing storage utilization efficiency and making data more
difficult to search, share, and analyze.
EMC® Isilon® scale-out NAS storage simplifies healthcare data management. EMC
Isilon provides a single file system that manages data as a single pool of storage,
while maintaining the performance required of each use case. A single file system
reduces management complexity and increases storage utilization rates.
EMC Isilon solutions work with many healthcare ISV applications, and easily scales at
the push of a button to meet growing storage needs. Isilon also serves as a
foundation for a scale-out data lake, making data analytics-ready in place.
TRENDS DRIVING A NEED FOR CHANGE
Several factors are forcing healthcare organizations to rethink their storage strategy:
More data to store: Storage capacity requirements continue to grow at a significant
rate. The shift to data-intensive digital images for X-rays, ultrasounds, and other
diagnostic instruments, and the increased use of diagnostic tests in general all
contribute to the rate of data volume increase. As the number of storage devices
increases to support the rising volume of data, so too does the IT resource capability
required to maintain the growing systems.
Inefficient use of storage capacity: In many healthcare organizations, storage is
organized and managed by diagnostic function or department. Each department has
its own application—with associated storage—which creates multiple storage systems,
each requiring independent management. Further, since capacity is not shared
between departments, independent management of storage systems constrains disk
sharing. For example, a Radiology PACS system may require additional capacity, and
while a Cardiology PACS system within the same organization may have capacity to
spare, that storage cannot be easily made available for the radiology department.
The inability to share surplus capacity between functional areas regularly leads to
healthcare storage utilization rates well under 50 percent. Siloing of resources
increases storage management cost, complexity, and inefficiency, causing healthcare
organizations to buy more storage than necessary to meet the demands of different
groups.
Changing data retention requirements: Patient records, clinical study results, and
medical diagnostic images are now required to be stored for longer periods of time.
While there is a need to have all of the data available, it’s not cost effective to keep all
of the data at the highest performance storage tier at all times. The longer retention
periods place additional burden on staff to migrate the data to new storage arrays
repeatedly and redirect existing applications to the new infrastructure, which
increases in cost as the amount of data increases.
Emerging diagnostic and therapeutic fields generate vast volumes of new
data: The adoption of new diagnostic imaging techniques and tools increases the
generation of data. Examples include digital pathology and microscopy, sleep studies
involving video surveillance data, and the incorporation of next-generation sequencing
(NGS) and proteomics to customize disease treatments.
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Equipment associated with these new fields can produce unprecedented volumes of
data: for example, a typical NGS study can create an additional 100 to 200 GB of data
per study, per patient. Current siloed storage infrastructures will not scale to meet
this expanding data management demand, and costs and complexity will rise.
Need data to provide insight: As the market moves towards an outcomes-based
model such as Accountable Care Organizations, access to data (both current and
historic) is more important. As more multidisciplinary and personalized treatments
are introduced, healthcare organizations need to ensure extended access to shared
data, especially as the cost of lost data is so high. Also, IT staffs need to prepare to
handle the upcoming demands to help their users make data-driven decisions to
improve quality at a lower costs. As they acquire an increasing amount of data, how
do they leverage their infrastructure to enable analytics without creating yet another
future silo of data for their analytics needs?
INFRASTRUCTURE MANAGEMENT COMPLICATIONS
DUE TO DATA GROWTH
To keep pace with the explosion of data, many healthcare organizations simply add
dedicated, capacity for each new workload. Unfortunately, while this may seem as the
easier solution, it creates yet another siloed data repository. Creating siloed storage
requires more floor space, electricity and cooling, additional backups, and separate
management of each data volume. In most cases, this means running systems at low
utilization rates, which translates to increased cost and management complexity.
Tight IT budgets may strain matters further, as healthcare organizations find
themselves with budgets unable to support increased storage needs. With siloed
storage, costs and management duties increase as more devices are added, forcing IT
staff to divert time and resources ordinarily spent on other projects. IT staff time
becomes dedicated to storage management instead of managing growth, and CapEx
and OpEx increase.
SEEKING A SOLUTION
Healthcare organizations need a unified storage solution that is highly scalable and
highly efficient—one that is able to meet the requirements of multiple use cases while
offering price/performance tiered storage that supports multidisciplinary
computational workloads. EMC Isilon scale-out NAS storage offers healthcare
providers a path to simplify data management, increase storage utilization, achieve
leading scalability and prepare the infrastructure to support the future analytic needs.
EMC ISILON SIMPLICITY, SCALABILITY,
AND BEST-IN-CLASS PERFORMANCE
EMC Isilon solutions are already used in leading healthcare organizations around the
world, providing industry-leading data protection and a single pool of storage without
sacrificing performance. The EMC Isilon storage pool scales at the push of a button—
with no downtime—to meet future storage needs, providing unsurpassed investment
protection. As additional nodes are added, data is automatically balanced to evenly
spread load across the entire cluster, increasing performance linearly as storage
capacity increases.
Every EMC Isilon solution can seamlessly scale on demand, enabling healthcare
organizations to add hundreds of terabytes of storage or expand performance in
minutes without downtime. At the same time, Isilon’s modular architecture and
intelligent software make deployment and management simple. Powered by its
OneFS® operating system, every EMC Isilon cluster is a single pool of storage with a
single namespace, eliminating the need to support multiple volumes and file systems.
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OneFS combines the three layers of traditional storage architectures—file system,
volume manager, and data protection—into one unified software layer, creating a
single intelligent file system that spans all nodes within a cluster. Unlike simple NAS
namespace aggregation products, the EMC Isilon OneFS operating system is truly
distributed and intelligently stripes data across all nodes in a cluster to create a single,
shared pool of storage. OneFS offers unsurpassed mission-critical reliability and
industry-leading drive rebuild times.
OneFS also delivers unique cluster-aware symmetric multiprocessing (SMP)
capabilities that enable the system to move tasks between processors for extremely
efficient workload balancing. In conjunction with the OneFS ability to stripe data
across all nodes in a cluster, EMC Isilon achieves the high aggregate bandwidth
performance required to power next-generation healthcare data centers.
EMC Isilon also offers the industry’s first suite of scale-out storage data management
applications. The enterprise-class applications allow an administrator to meet critical
data protection, access, management, and availability requirements. Three
applications that are particularly relevant to healthcare are the SyncIQ, SmartPools
and SmartLock—applications that provide data replication, auto-tiering, and data
protection capabilities.
APPLICATION
PURPOSE
SYNCIQ™
Data Replication
SMARTPOOLS™
Resource
Management
SMARTLOCK™
Data Retention
DESCRIPTION
Replicate and distribute data sets to multiple
shared storage systems in multiple sites to
provide a reliable disaster recovery capability,
compliant with healthcare needs
Healthcare data is retrained for longer periods
than ever before. While it’s important to have
all the data available, older, less-frequently
accessed data can be automatically moved to
lower cost tiers—transparently to the
application—optimizing storage costs for older
data.
Protect your critical data against accidental,
premature, or malicious alteration or deletion
with our software-based approach to write
once read many (WORM)
MOVING BEYOND SILOS TO
BETTER HEALTHCARE DATA MANAGEMENT
The combination of EMC Isilon hardware, single file system, and OneFS management
software delivers the performance needed to meet the growing data challenge facing
today’s healthcare organizations. The Isilon solution simplifies storage management
while providing robust data protection, efficient storage utilization, and lower
operating costs essential to successful healthcare data storage management. Isilon
CONTACT US
To learn more about how EMC
products, services, and solutions can
help solve your business and IT
challenges, contact your local
representative or authorized reseller,
visit www.emc.com, or explore and
compare products in the EMC Store.
also natively support Hadoop based applications via HDFS. This allows organizations
to create a “data lake” for their enterprise, easing the road to data analytics to
improve patient care and lower costs.
EMC2, EMC, the EMC logo, Isilon, OneFS, SmartLock, SmartPools, and SyncIQ are registered
trademarks or trademarks of EMC Corporation in the United States and other countries. All other
trademarks used herein are the property of their respective owners. © Copyright 2015 EMC
Corporation. All rights reserved. Published in the USA. 01/15 EMC Perspective H10740.3
EMC believes the information in this document is accurate as of its publication date. The
information is subject to change without notice.
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